What is the ORB?

The Object Request Broker (ORB) is the central component of CORBA. The ORB provides the required infrastructure to identify and locate objects, handle connection management, deliver data, and request communication.

A CORBA object never talks directly with another. Instead, the object makes requests through a remote stub to the ORB running on the local machine. The local ORB then passes the request to an ORB on the other machine using the Internet Inter-Orb Protocol (IIOP for short). The remote ORB
then locates the appropriate object, processes the request, and returns the results.

IIOP can be used as a Remote Method Invocation (RMI) protocol by applications or objects using RMI-IIOP. Remote clients of enterprise beans (EJB modules) communicate with the Application Server via RMI-IIOP.